Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Surveyor
is the magazine for highways and transport professionals.This month’s issue is headlined ‘Return of
the Regions’ and opens to reveal an editorial by Dominic Browne, and more
besides.The editorial starts as
follows:

“In January of this year the Department for Transport
(DfT) launched a small (by government standards) pilot competition for local
authorities to find ‘total transport’ solutions in rural and isolated
communities.

To some this may have seemed fairly innocuous; a
scrambled attempt to cover ground in local services left barren by revenue
cuts.Yet the guidance for bidders
contained a line that appeared to herald something more than spin, smoke and
mirrors; something that looked like an honest appeal.

‘Service integration has not been attempted on any
scale up to now, so the essential first step is for local authorities to work
out how to go about it.’

Events this month, where we have seen the wheel of
public reform turn once more, recalled this line.

When the coalition government first came into power,
the word regional was banned.Localism
was the new watchword.This month saw
the concept of regionalism bloom again.Across the North and the Midlands two
major bodies built of local authorities are ready to take on statutory powers
for regional transport planning.While
in the West Country, Surveyor has been told there is an ‘aspiration for
more formalised regional control of transport’.

Further south, we see major sub-regional groups
developing.In the East Midlands we have
the two great communities of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire planning a joint
combined authority and in ‘England’s Economic Heartland’ of Northamptonshire,
Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, we have an integrated total transport plan
blossoming that, in its conception, actually pre-dates the DfT’s competition.

Some of this goes back to traditional English
regionalism.The North, and to a lesser
extent the Midlands, have always been comfortable seeing themselves as
individual cultural entities, while some even still see Cornwall, another
beneficiary of recent devolution, as a country in itself.In the south, where demarcation is more of an
economic issue, sub-regional transport planning may be more practical.The capital of course, effectively a region
in itself, already has the might of Transport for London working for it…”

Poor old South.The devil’s in the demarcation, isn’t
it?Boundaries may be fuzzy but we know
where the North and the Midlands are.We might even be able to point out East Anglia, another traditional entity but now
one sadly subsumed into the ‘East of England’
Prescott zone, where it rubs shoulders with
north London.But the South?And the West?Here it gets confused.

In 1919 Professor C.B.
Fawcett published a famous, not to say infamous, work entitled Provinces of England: A Study of Some
Geographical Aspects of Devolution.It included a map of 12 provinces, defined by physical features and
ignoring county boundaries.The only nod
to history was the re-use of certain names as labels of convenience. Cornwall and
Devon were combined as the ‘Devon
Province’.The ‘Wessex
Province’ comprised no more than the Solent basin.In
between was an area stretching from the Wye valley to the English Channel, grouped
as the ‘Bristol Province’.Fawcett explained its name as follows:

“Round Bristol the
popular regional name has been ‘West of England’ or ‘West Country’.But our Bristol Province has no better claim
to the name ‘West of England’ than the West Midland Province has, and a less
claim than could be made on behalf of Devon; while the term ‘West Country’ has
different local meanings from north to south of England – in Durham and
Northumberland it refers to Cumberland and Westmorland.”

Generations of the more materialist
regionalists have praised the prof for his objectivity and lack of sentiment.Most fail to comment on the fact that in 1942
Fawcett revised his map, now with 11 provinces, several minor and some major
boundary changes, plus a couple of name changes while he was about it.Surely unassailable objective reality ought
not to be that malleable?

Cultural geography is about
people and the place they call home.It
picks up where physical geography leaves off and it’s what’s rightly central to
any discussion about English regionalism from below. It’s because that voice from below is so often
suppressed that we have this difficulty with demarcation down south.It’s why we’re assured that it’s absolutely
all about economics, and the functional parameters of accommodating and
responding to growth, and not at all about culture.

Is Cornwall part of the ‘West Country’?For a Cornishman, the west starts at Truro and carries on to
the Isles of Scilly.Cornwall has the Cornish Riviera.Devon has
the English Riviera.You might think the
penny of national separation would have dropped by now.So if England’s West Country extends no
further west than the Tamar, how far east does it go?According to a recent study of regional
accents by YouGov, no further than Somerset.Not even as far as Brisawl, me lover.

The ‘West Country’ is a
slippery term because it’s defined by those living to the east of it.It’s what’s down west from London
and as London’s
sphere of influence grows so the West Country shrinks.Between the wars it was still possible to describe
Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset as the ‘Middle
West’ (the reference is from Lovely
Britain, edited by Mais and Stephenson), somewhere too far west to be the
Home Counties and not west enough to be the real West Country.

Wessex today is split west-east – between the ‘South West’
and ‘South East’ Prescott zones – but another line would be north-west /
south-east. Even in the days of our
independence we had Wessex
west of Selwood and Wessex
east of Selwood, the diocese of Sherborne and the diocese of Winchester.As with the Highland / Lowland line in Scotland, our
geography has shaped our history, creating divisions for others to exploit if
they will.Whereas a self-governing region
could work to strengthen the lines of communication that bind us together, the
priorities of the London regime for centuries
have been to follow the lines of least resistance, the tentacles that reach
into deepest Wessex.There’s the Bath Road, the Kennet & Avon Canal,
the Great Western Railway and the M4 going to the west; the Portsmouth Road, the London & South Western
Railway and the M3 going to the south.Or so it’s presented.The reality
is that of travel in the opposite direction, for these are not primarily the
bonds of a resilient and self-confident region.They’re the great veins along which our region’s tribute flows up to London, never to be seen
again.

The demarcation problem in
‘the South’ is insoluble so long as London
is allowed to dominate.The North and
the Midlands aspire to break free of London
and they have the distance and the spirit to make it so whenever they
choose.As Surveyor’s editorial notes, the South may be tending to see its
future solely in terms of sub-regions, satellites submissive to the will of the
Great Wen, not defined, as others are, in resistance to it.So long as that’s the case then it deserves
the environmental and social catastrophe that’s heading towards it as London overspill eyes its
fields.

It doesn’t have to be that
way though.Wessex
has a flag, Wessex has a patron
saint, Wessex
has its own, much abused dialect.We
have as much right as any Mercian or Northumbrian to govern ourselves.In so far as we’re on London’s doorstep, our culture in the front
line facing the steamroller, we have a stronger and more urgent case than they
do.

Our first priority,
naturally, is to jettison the idea of the ‘West Country’, a concept far too
flexible for its own good.Wessex is an alternative name that retains the
idea of being placed geographically to the west of London.It does so without the notions of ineradicable inferiority, mental
dumbness and infinite recession into peninsular twilight that have
characterised a view of the ‘West Country’ handed down from above.One busy lopping off our eastern shires one
by one.

Monday, November 23, 2015

Quelle surprise!As we noted in September, France was an
easy target for terror.So, ten days on
from the Paris
attacks, how’s the reaction unfolding?

Canadian blogger Vlad Tepes
sums up the polarisation:

“The most important thing you can do when people you
don’t know are murdered by Muslims in an act designed to promote the primacy of
Islam, is show your moral superiority to people who would like to take
meaningful action by demonstrating grief…People tripping over themselves in self-sacrifice, trying to tell the
people who want them dead or enslaved how there will be no ‘backlash’ instead
of at the very very least going en masse to the mosques and screaming: ‘stop
the hate’.”

And when the candles and the
flowers and the teddy bears have been cleared away, what will remain?

There’s little serious anger
that carries through.From a position of
strength, that would be good news.From
a position of weakness, it only underlines that weakness.The silence is nervous.It’s well-known that the ISIS strategy is to
destabilise Europe, to make normal life
unpredictable, to create the conditions in which submission to the gangsters’
will seems the safest option.Part of that
strategy is placing Europe’s leaders apart
from the led.They won’t be targeted.They’re too useful as they are: mostly perceived as bumbling,
incompetent, and lacking any will to defend their people.Get rid of them and you only invite the more
determined to replace them.

François Hollande ramps up
the rhetoric but results will be another matter.Pending anything better, la gloire is back.France is bombing Raqqa, because France is now
at war.France was bombing Raqqa anyway,
because that was just fooling around?The
tricolour has been much in evidence across the globe.It’s forgotten, for now, that its history is
no more glorious than the swastika’s.Remember the Vendée, the génocide franco-français.France’s
politicians, gathering last week at Versailles,
belted out their national anthem, as we’re all now encouraged to do.‘Do you hear, in the countryside, the roar of
those ferocious soldiers?Let's march,
let's march!Let an impure blood water
our furrows!’Yes, they still get away
with that, but it’s not our Europe:
it’s a gory theatre of the absurd, founded upon a lie (that France in 1792 was
not the aggressor).

Hollande insists that he
will defend the Republic.Not so much France.Not so much the French.La République, a hate cult of hypocrisy, historic
enemy of European regionalism, the proto-fascist State over which Hollande
presides, one that despite his best efforts still cannot bring itself to
legalise any indigenous language on its territory besides French.(To quote Musa Anter, a Kurdish writer assassinated
in 1992, "If my mother tongue is
shaking the foundations of your state, it probably means that you built your
state on my land.")Republican
values are the new Falklands factor – the art
of war turned to domestic political advantage.A false flag operation?We’ve no
evidence, but the motive is clear enough.

France likes to think it has a special relationship with
the Mahometan world, one strangely informed by a millennium of conflict with it,
real or imagined.Charles Martel at Tours.Roland at Roncevaux.St
Louis on Crusade.Napoleon in Egypt.Charles X seizing Algiers.Charles de Gaulle letting it go.It’s not actually the most promising basis for peaceful co-existence.

Nor is Britain’s
record.A century ago the UK made
promises to the Arabs and the Jews.It
would be simplistic to say that the promises to the Jews were kept and those to
the Arabs were not.Neither got
everything they expected.But the Arabs,
and the Kurds, got a lot more than they bargained for.Promises of self-government if the Ottoman
yoke were thrown off became the reality of a new colonial yoke.

In 1920 an insurgency broke
out in Iraq
against the British occupation.RAF
bombing of the area continued throughout the decade.The Air Ministry considered it useful
practice for other territories where “armed
forces are required to give effect to British policy and uphold British
prestige”.Not least because it was
so much cheaper than deploying ground troops.Squadron Leader Arthur Harris reported after several such punitive raids
that: "The Arab and Kurd now know
what real bombing means in casualties and damage.Within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be
practically wiped out, and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured, by four
or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as
warriors, no effective means of escape."At the time of the Arab revolt in Palestine in the late 1930s, Air Commodore
Harris, as he then was, declared that "the
only thing the Arab understands is the heavy hand, and sooner or later it will
have to be applied".Ancient
history this may now be, but the lands cursed with oil have a particular way of
keeping the past in mind as they navigate the present.The wonder is not that Europe
suffers from terrorist atrocities.It’s
that patience proved so long-lasting.

What strikes westerners as
not-quite-cricket is the worldwide extra-territorial jurisdiction that
religious regimes claim, in defiance of international norms.Killing cartoonists is the ever sharper
expression of an idea that began in the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran and which
the civilised world failed to challenge effectively.In the UK we may tend to remember the
fatwa against Salman Rushdie.In France it’s more likely to be the murder in
Paris of Shapour Bakhtiar, a remarkable man who was secular Iran’s last
hope.But all such incursions into
European sovereignty pale into insignificance set against the western
assumption that eastern regimes exist to be changed at will, whatever the
locals think.However tempting it is to
bomb Syria
without UN authority, the result will be more anti-western feeling, coupled
with more European guilt for the collateral damage (damage that’s only
terrorism by another name).Or if
nothing is done, an equal and opposite guilt for inaction.If Europeans are to defend themselves, they
must first question on what terms they think it proper to decide the fate of
others.

Europe’s defence is bound to
become more inward-looking because Europe is
forming a smaller and smaller proportion of the world’s population.(Its share is expected to halve between now
and 2050.)The ultimate triumph of
universal human rights is no longer assured, because the expanding populations
of the world may have no use for them.They may view them with indifference, or with hostility.Either way, Europeans need to be more
watchful of what happens to their own rights and make that task their first priority,
because it may be that no-one else will.Europe is busy renouncing its
enlightenment heritage because others find it offensive.Since only those with something to hide are
offended by the truth, it would be better not to retreat from the enlightenment
but to shine the torch deeper, into our own society and into others’.But that’s not what will happen.On the contrary, we’ll continue to allow
victims to be created by allowing others to use the value system of the victims’
own society against them.Nice work for
lawyers.

As terror attacks escalate,
so the paradigm by which Europe’s rulers rule crumbles.It survives only so long as it offers
satisfying explanations of why the world is as it is.European unity has been shaken by the migrant
crisis, with one of its most unambiguous achievements – the borderless Schengen
area – now in tatters.Counter-terrorism
demands closer co-operation across borders, better sharing of intelligence,
perhaps a Europe where unity is enjoyed by the
rulers even as it ceases to exist for the ruled.It’s not a Europe
that necessarily requires the EU, democratic or otherwise, which may be one
reason why the EU is under political challenge.

Predictions of Mahometan
conquest are far-fetched but only because they’re wrongly framed in military
terms: a formal State structure can survive long after the internal reality of
which active minority wields power in society has been utterly
transformed.One only has to look at
Tower Hamlets under Mayor Lutfur Rahman to see how easily the corruption of Bangladesh can be reproduced wholesale in a London borough if standards are not upheld.Given the London party consensus that elected mayors
are better than open government, we can only expect to see more of this.But even Europe, tolerant, self-loathing Europe, ever apologetic, ever happy to accept that two
wrongs make a right, has a tipping point, a point of calling to account.

Expect far Right, anti-EU
parties to fill at least part of the vacuum left by the collapsing paradigm of
the politically correct.Expect
xenophobia to make no distinction between guilty and innocent: a presumption of
innocence is essential for justice, but not for security.It’s not impossible to imagine some countries
taking things as far as mass expulsion of religious minorities deemed too
troublesome to remain, especially once those countries are outside the EU.It’s what happened in Spain in the 17th
century, a move obviously considered worth it despite the economic damage it
wrought.Many of Spain’s moriscos
ended up in north Africa, swelling the ranks of the Barbary pirates who took
their revenge on Europe’s coastal communities, including those in Wessex.Terrorism is nothing new and neither is the
suite of possible responses.About the
only‘self-evident truth’ is that the less
Mahometanism there is in Europe, and in the
world, the less terrorism there can be.That
calculation, that suspicion of the murky middle ground, that condemnation even
of the fiercest fighters against the likes of ISIS,
is the real tragedy.Europeans aware of
their history and confronted once again by an ideology that demands the death
penalty for thought-crime may rather be safe than sorry.It doesn’t lessen the tragedy.

If far Right parties fill
part of the vacuum it’s also true that they can’t fill it all.There are equal opportunities for other
visions of Europe: most vitally a Europe of
small nations and historic regions, decentralised, democratic, inclusive (of
those willing to be included), yet passionately protective of traditional rights and
committed to international justice rather than to the addictions of repression
and war.It’s a strong possibility in
the longer term, but getting there could be a close-run thing.

Monday, November 9, 2015

Yesterday
our President and Secretary-General travelled to Stafford
to attend a meeting of the Acting Witan of Mercia.

The Acting
Witan arose out of a group called the Mercia Movement, who researched and
published as The Mercia Manifesto
their vision of an autonomous and sustainable bioregion in the English
Midlands.In 2001 this led to the
calling of a widely publicised Mercian Constitutional Convention to debate a
draft constitution for the region.The
Convention worked patiently and good-humouredly for many months to agree a
constitution.Its efforts culminated in a
declaration of independence read out in front of the Birmingham Council House on
Mercian Independence Day, 29th May 2003.Those who wished to remain active in campaigning for de facto self-government
constituted themselves as the Acting Witan and have continued to lead political
regionalism in Mercia.

At one
level this may all sound like play-acting, the Government-of-Mercia-in-Internal-Exile.In fact, relentless legitimacy is remarkably powerful in its ability to
put the London
regime on the spot.The Acting Witan has
signed up over 2,000 people as registered citizens of Mercia.How many citizens does the UK have?None, is the answer, only subjects of a
Norman Crown.How good does that look in
comparison?The Witan’s Convener, Jeff
Kent, has succeeded in having himself removed from the electoral register on
the grounds that he’s a Mercian, not British citizen.Bureaucracy has no way of knowing how to
respond to the unexpected and so eventually gives in.We were told
of correspondence with the London regime in
which civil servants are being backed into a corner until they ultimately
accept the role being written for them, as the UK’s
appointed negotiators over the formal transference of power to Mercia.

Meanwhile, Mercian
consciousness is growing, thanks to helpful events like the discovery of the
Staffordshire Hoard.We were shown
letters from successive Leaders of Stoke-on-Trent City Council looking forward
to working with the Acting Witan in promoting Mercian culture.Plans include a Mercia Day, which Stoke
acknowledges will need to be co-ordinated with other local authorities across
the region.

One reason
perhaps why regionalism is rushing up the agenda, driven this time from outside
the London
parties, is the size of the gap between what those parties laughingly call ‘devolution’
and what the term actually implies.While Scotland has a First Minister accountable to Scotland’s parliament,
the regions of England are to be reorganised into arbitrary areas headed by
elected mayors that no-one asked for.And accountable? Oh yes, once every four years, and in the meantime free to strut about like Mussolini to conceal their lack of real power. Patience with London’s lies is wearing
thin.

Natural and
human systems often have a weak point that is an aspect of their greatest
strength.The London
regime’s greatest strength is its antiquity, and its weak point is the
ultimately unlawful nature of that, namely, the Crown stolen at Hastings.The Acting Witan plans, when its resources allow, to set up a regional
court to try establishment figures for numerous crimes against the land and
people of Mercia.Seats in the public gallery can be expected
to go very early that day!

Our
relations with the Acting Witan have always been exceptionally good.Both our movements recognise that the other
is trying out an experiment to see if it works.Ours is to see if an English regionalist party can follow the electoral
path to success that the Celtic nationalist parties have mapped out.The Mercian road to regionalism seeks instead
to re-invent politics itself from the bottom up.It’s not a race, but we both hope to learn
whatever we can from the experiences of the other.

WR started
earlier, in a blaze of publicity in 1974, and have managed largely to avoid
splits and splinters.Mercia has not
fared so well, with a galaxy of often tiny groups claiming to speak for the
region, sometimes reacting to the discovery of the others by refusing to work
with them.It could be a parody of Monty Python’sLife of Brian: the Mercian People’s Front versus the People’s Front
of Mercia.From what we observed
yesterday, that seems to be on the point of changing.The ground has been cleared.Now the time to plant has come.